Cleaning up voting mess

Published: Sunday, December 9, 2012 at 08:00 AM.

If the November elections proved anything, it’s that Florida still has some work to do conducting elections.

It’s good to see the Legislature is taking seriously the problems voters experienced this year. They weren’t the catastrophic ballot failures and vote-counting fiascos of 2000. Nevertheless, interminable lines at the polls that forced many voters to wait hours to cast their ballots, and inordinate delays in tabulating results were unacceptable, aggravating and embarrassing, once again making the state the butt of jokes of late-night talk show hosts.

Last week lawmakers met to debrief Secretary of State Ken Detzner about the problems, assess what went wrong and begin formulating solutions. There was a bipartisan consensus that changes were necessary.

It seems clear that at least two things contributed to excessive waiting times: a ballot made unusually long by the addition of 11 constitutional amendments — all of them proposed by a Legislature unconstrained by restrictions on ballot language — and a dearth of polling places during a high-turnout election.

Considering that eight of the 11 amendments were soundly defeated, Republican lawmakers might have learned their lesson not to attempt to legislate so liberally through the state constitution. To be safe, though, the Legislature should repeal a 2011 law that exempted it from a 75-word limit on ballot summaries that outside interest groups must abide by. That made for verbose measures that took longer to read, consumed more pages and were difficult to understand, and which often packed more than one idea into a single proposal.

In this instance, brevity is the soul of governing.

The other fix within the Legislature’s control involves increasing the number of voting sites, especially during early voting. County supervisors of elections are restricted by law to using city halls, libraries and local election offices for early voting. As a result, Miami-Dade County had one early voting site per 66,000 voters.

If the November elections proved anything, it’s that Florida still has some work to do conducting elections.

It’s good to see the Legislature is taking seriously the problems voters experienced this year. They weren’t the catastrophic ballot failures and vote-counting fiascos of 2000. Nevertheless, interminable lines at the polls that forced many voters to wait hours to cast their ballots, and inordinate delays in tabulating results were unacceptable, aggravating and embarrassing, once again making the state the butt of jokes of late-night talk show hosts.

Last week lawmakers met to debrief Secretary of State Ken Detzner about the problems, assess what went wrong and begin formulating solutions. There was a bipartisan consensus that changes were necessary.

It seems clear that at least two things contributed to excessive waiting times: a ballot made unusually long by the addition of 11 constitutional amendments — all of them proposed by a Legislature unconstrained by restrictions on ballot language — and a dearth of polling places during a high-turnout election.

Considering that eight of the 11 amendments were soundly defeated, Republican lawmakers might have learned their lesson not to attempt to legislate so liberally through the state constitution. To be safe, though, the Legislature should repeal a 2011 law that exempted it from a 75-word limit on ballot summaries that outside interest groups must abide by. That made for verbose measures that took longer to read, consumed more pages and were difficult to understand, and which often packed more than one idea into a single proposal.

In this instance, brevity is the soul of governing.

The other fix within the Legislature’s control involves increasing the number of voting sites, especially during early voting. County supervisors of elections are restricted by law to using city halls, libraries and local election offices for early voting. As a result, Miami-Dade County had one early voting site per 66,000 voters.

Legislators should expand that criteria, giving counties more flexibility. They also could appropriate money to purchase more voting machines to relieve some of the crunch.

Those moves are even more crucial if the Legislature intends to maintain its limitations on early voting, which this year was reduced from 14 days to eight. Something has to give — more early voting days, or more places to vote.

Ironically, the Republican majority implemented these election-law changes in an attempt to encourage more Floridians to vote by absentee. If that was supposed to be more efficient and beneficial to the GOP, it failed on both counts. Not only did Republicans lose seats in the Legislature (and President Obama captured the state’s electoral votes), but many counties were overwhelmed by the number of mail-in ballots. That contributed significantly to the delay in tallying votes.

Furthermore, the Miami Herald reports that nearly 2,500 Miami-Dade County voters had their absentee ballots rejected this election for various reasons: the ballots were unsigned, the post office failed to deliver them in time, etc.

Detzner told lawmakers last week that he would conduct a fact-finding tour of five counties — Lee, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and St. Lucie — to investigate why they “underperformed.” Senate Ethics and Elections Committee Chairman Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, also announced a plan to hold at least two hearings in South Florida.

That’s a good start, but officials shouldn’t limit their inquiry into just a handful of areas, the most egregious cases. They need to survey every county. Just because it might have taken “only” two hours to vote in Bay County, as opposed to six in Broward, doesn’t mean that time is acceptable.

All 67 county supervisors of elections should be consulted as to how the system can be improved, and what they need to make it happen.